Yes, that’s why I’m also looking at papers (Thalbourne is one that immediately springs to mind) that address that issue. There’s quite a lot of work done on religious belief too, I’ve noticed, which has trickled over.

‘Perhaps in a attempt to draw a sense of empowerment and self-esteem in an environment that was oppressively skewed against our interests?’

Oh, I have SO found women claiming that aspect!! Honestly, one of the first things that came to mind was the ‘Granny Weatherwax’ analogy of empowering a woman in a society, with access to what she called ‘headology’ (if you read Pratchett, despite the magic nature of Discworld, she is a character who blatantly draws upon psychology to get things done too).

The most recent example I’ve found of luring women into thinking that fortune-telling works, features on late-night TV advertising, with mobile phone gimmicks (the BONGO phenomenon, that I’ve blogged about before). But it’s getting more and more overt with more and more ‘features’. If one’s sense of empowerment and self-esteem is boosted by an SMS message saying ‘he was never good enough for you anyway’… well….

I’m not terribly convinced by the the evidence that women are more inclined to appeal to supernatural or paranormal phenomena than men. First of all, attempts to quantify this tend to to immediately fall into experimental bias (perilously close to question begging) by trying to draw a line between conventional religion and “all that other fluff about runes, crystals, and lay lines”. All forms of spirituality considered, the current evidence (based on census data for example) clearly show no significant difference between men and women in terms of being more or less likely to appeal to the supernatural.

Historically, it is clear that men have strongly embraced the supernatural, and that this, together with social trends, has resulted in the majority of “conventional” forms of spirituality being overtly paternalistic. I agree with the opinion that the association of such things as astrology, Tarot, and neo-paganism with the feminine is a side-effect of the gender-neutral appeal of these alternative spiritualities rather than evidence that women have some gender-specific predisposition towards them; i.e. women don’t embrace these traditions because they have some intrinsic female desire to do so, but because they have an intrinsic human desire to escape a preexisting spiritual framework that marginalises and humiliates them as a group. In a female-dominated society, is it unreasonable to imagine that it would be us men who could be found hunched over crystal balls and Tarot cards? Perhaps in a attempt to draw a sense of empowerment and self-esteem in an environment that was oppressively skewed against our interests?